A new book, Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America’s Death Penalty, describes the his­to­ry of flawed exe­cu­tions in the U.S. from 1890 to 2010. During that peri­od, 8,776 peo­ple were exe­cut­ed and 276 of those exe­cu­tions went wrong in some way. Of all the meth­ods used, lethal injec­tion had the high­est rate of botched exe­cu­tions – about 7%. Austin Sarat, the author of the book and a pro­fes­sor of jurispru­dence and polit­i­cal sci­ence at Amherst College, described the evo­lu­tion of new meth­ods of exe­cu­tion: ​“With each devel­op­ment in the tech­nol­o­gy of exe­cu­tion, the same promis­es have been made, that each new tech­nol­o­gy was safe, reli­able, effec­tive and humane. Those claims have not gen­er­al­ly been ful­filled.” In an inter­view, Sarat was asked how the recent botched exe­cu­tion of Clayton Lockett might affect the pub­lic dis­cus­sion on the death penal­ty. He replied, ​“This exe­cu­tion has hap­pened at a time of nation­al recon­sid­er­a­tion of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment. The death penal­ty is real­ly declin­ing. I’m tempt­ed to say it’s dying in the United States. Public sup­port is down, the num­ber of death sen­tences over the last decade or so has been cut by two thirds, the num­ber of exe­cu­tions is down by about 50 per­cent. More and more, Americans are focus­ing on the prac­ti­cal real­i­ties and wor­ry­ing that while the death penal­ty might in some abstract way sat­is­fy some peo­ple, when you look at how it’s actu­al­ly admin­is­tered, maybe it’s not worth the cost.”

(G. Miller, ​“America’s Long and Gruesome History of Botched Executions,” Wired, May 12, 2014; A. Sarat, ​“Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America’s Death Penalty” (Stanford Univ. Press 2014)). See Books and Botched Executions.

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